Cultivation of immortality begins with an eighty-year-old eunuch.

According to the records in the Blood Tempering Technique Jade Slip, the ancient demon's bloodline power originated from an ancestor in ancient times.

That ancestor swallowed the core of an entire star, refining the star's power into his bloodline. From then on, his descendants were born with physical strength comparable to that of a star.

As bloodlines are passed down through generations, the power within them diminishes with dilution, which is the origin of the nine grades of bloodlines.

Those with the highest-grade bloodlines possess abundant ancestral power within their bodies, making physical cultivation twice as effective.

Those of the lowest bloodline have ancestral power as meager as a flickering candle, and even if they exhaust their entire lives, they will find it difficult to achieve anything.

Chen Fan's body is of the lowest grade among the three lowest grades.

The ancestral power within him was so weak that it was almost imperceptible. When he used the Blood Tempering Technique to circulate his bloodline power, it felt like squeezing a drop of water from a dried-up riverbed.

But Chen Fan was not discouraged. He was not concerned with the cultivation results of this body, but with the internal logic of the ancient demon body-refining method.

He kept making comparisons.

For example, the body-refining techniques of the ancient demon can be compared and cross-referenced with the immortal-demon fusion method cultivated by his true self.

The ancient demon disperses the power of his bloodline throughout his limbs and bones, tempering his muscles, bones, and skin. His power of fusion between immortal and demonic energy is to combine immortal and demonic energy in his dantian and then transport it throughout his body via his meridians.

Although the two seem unrelated, they both involve infusing some kind of power into every corner of the body, making the body itself a part of the power, rather than merely a container for it.

If he could integrate the ancient demon's blood tempering technique into the immortal demon body refining method, the strength of his physical body might be able to reach another level.

After this discovery, Chen Fan became more proactive in his attitude toward the ancient demon cultivation method.

He no longer simply followed the daily refining routine, but began to consciously try to improve.

For example, we could slightly adjust the blood circulation route of the Blood Tempering Technique to see if it could improve the cultivation efficiency of this body even by the slightest bit.

This experiment was conducted repeatedly over a period of more than half a month, during which there were far more failures than successes.

Once, he tried to force the power of his bloodline into a meridian that was originally blocked. As a result, his entire arm swelled up for three days, and the blood droplets seeping from under the scales congealed into a layer of dark red hard shell.

However, Chen Fan did not stop. Under this cultivation method, his understanding of the ancient demon body-refining technique was slowly but steadily deepening.

He meticulously recorded every tiny bit of progress, to be used as a reference when he returned to his original form in the future.

……

Time slipped away quietly under the gray-yellow sky.

Chen Fan has been living on this ancient demon planet for almost a full year.

More than three hundred sunrises and sunsets—not a long time, but not a short time either—are enough for an outsider to get used to the sulfurous air, the cracked yellow earth, and the ghostly beasts churning in the mud.

At the edge of the mud pit, Chen Fan crouched down and pushed a half-rotted monster carcass into the water. The moment the water splashed up, a huge black shadow pounced from the bottom of the pit, its massive jaws, filled with barbed teeth, precisely biting the carcass's neck and dragging it to the bottom.

Behind it, the other Netherworld Beasts were eager to make a move, but they kept a distance of several feet from it and dared not step forward to snatch it.

The creature scrambling for food was the Netherworld Beast that Chen Fan had saved.

A year ago, it was skinny and bloated, but now it has grown to over six zhang tall and has become the undisputed leader of this group of Netherworld Beasts. Its scales are jet black and shiny, and when its turbid eyes look at Chen Fan by the pool, they have lost some of the bloodlust and vigilance they had a year ago, and gained a hint of inexplicable docility.

Chen Fan raised his hand and patted its forehead. The cold, sticky touch was still not very pleasant, but the giant beast narrowed its eyes and let out a low purr from deep in its throat, like a cat whose fur had been stroked.

"It's easier to raise than Black Wind," Chen Fan muttered to himself, his mind involuntarily conjuring up the image of the big, lazy, black horse and the silly dog ​​that chased Black Wind around all day.

After feeding the Netherworld Beast, Chen Fan returned to the stone house.

He spent a month leveling the open space in front of the house, which was originally filled with rubble, and turned it into a small medicinal herb field.

It was about three-tenths of an acre in size, planted with more than ten kinds of herbs commonly found on the ancient demon planet.

There are dark red grass, gray moss, black bone flower, and bloodthorn vine. These herbs are nothing more than roadside weeds and miscellaneous trees in the eyes of the local ancient demons, but in Chen Fan's eyes, they each have their own uses.

Dark red grass combined with gray moss can treat external bleeding, and crushed black bone flower applied to joints can relieve muscle and bone pain after body training.

Soaking the flesh in diluted bloodthorn vine juice can form a very thin protective film on the surface of scales, protecting against wind, sand, and poisonous insects.

Most of this pharmacological knowledge was something Chen Fan had gradually figured out over the course of a year. He was originally a master alchemist, and although he had been given an ancient demon body and could no longer circulate spiritual power to control the infant fire, the alchemical theories in his mind remained.

The ability to identify the medicinal properties of herbs and the principles of combining herbs according to their properties are ingrained and will not be lost simply because one has a different body.

At the edge of the medicinal herb field, Chen Fan had also built a simple sunshade, under which were placed several earthenware jars. Inside the jars was a medicinal ointment he had made from dark red herbs and several auxiliary medicines, specifically for treating external injuries.

The other jar contained a hemostatic powder made primarily from gray moss.

These ointments and powders may look simple and crude, but they represent the best formula he arrived at after dozens of trials and errors.

The ancient demon race revered the physical body and believed in the supremacy of strength, and had always looked down on the delicate work of humans, such as alchemy and medicine making.

Within the tribe, only the most basic shamans would use a few herbs to brew some medicinal soup. As for ointments, pills, powders, and other preparations that require precise control of fire and repeated refining, they are almost extinct among the ancient demon tribe.

Chen Fan picked up a bone shovel, loosened the soil in the medicinal field, and then used a wooden bucket to draw several buckets of water from the ditch to irrigate it.

The pale yellow sunlight cast a long shadow of him, and his rough scales, covered in dirt and sweat, made him look quite like a farmer.

After finishing these tasks, he sat cross-legged on the open ground in front of the stone house and began his Blood Tempering Technique training for the day.

Over the course of the year, his understanding of the Blood Tempering Technique had become completely different. The ancient demon's body-refining method emphasized "tempering the body with blood," and the purer the bloodline power, the stronger the tempering effect.

The bloodline of the highest grade can achieve in one day what the bloodline of the lowest grade takes in a hundred days. This is an ironclad rule passed down through generations of the ancient demon race.

However, this does not mean that those of lower bloodlines are helpless.

Through repeated attempts, Chen Fan discovered that the Blood Tempering Technique's operational path was not monolithic. The cultivation method left behind by the ancient demon ancestors was the most universally applicable path, like an official road—anyone could walk it, but it might not be the most suitable for everyone.

However, there are subtle differences in the distribution of meridians and the flow of blood in each person.

Just like the same official road, some people are suited to riding horses, while others are suited to walking.

If one can adjust the circulation route slightly according to the characteristics of one's own bloodline, one can bypass those areas where the bloodline is thin and concentrate limited power in the smoothest meridians, achieving the greatest tempering effect with minimal consumption.